During his recent visit to the White House, US President Joe Biden promised Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the Ukrainian leader “will never be left alone”. The grinning Zelenskyy reminded me of a football manager who receives full public support from his club president just days before being sacked.
Public expression of support for the world’s most powerful man is likely to be as good as a broken strainer. Biden will keep the flow of American weapons to war against Russia as long as Washington does, and not a moment longer. So are all American promises.
After losing the 20-year war in Afghanistan, it is obvious that the United States is looking to fight and win future proxy battles. American boots on land will be in short supply. Someone else will fight America’s supposed enemies. But can Ukrainians trust Biden? Or any other American president? Over the years, the White House has betrayed others numerous times; just ask the Palestinians, the Vietnamese, the Iraqi Kurds and the Afghans, for example.
Washington is certainly a formidable enemy, but their friendship is also dangerous. Millions of Britons demonstrated against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but the friendship between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair drew British troops into a war that the country had clearly rejected. The result has been more than a million widows and orphans in Iraq, a country that remains in turmoil.
The betrayals of the United States in foreign policy are many, as the writer writes MEMORANDUM Omar Ahmed: “The United States is shaped in this sense. We have seen, for example, how they betrayed the Iraqi people during and after the 1991 uprisings; how they abandoned the Afghan government in the face of the Taliban takeover; how they stopped supporting armed opposition groups in Syria and how it has betrayed the Kurds on numerous occasions. Indeed, the way the US, under President Donald Trump, has turned its back on its Syrian Kurdish allies has meant that the Ukrainians would have been next to suffer a similar fate.”
Culture of hope: 2022 and the margins of victory in Palestine
I think the Ukrainian war was forced upon innocent Ukrainians, but not necessarily by Moscow. Russia was wrong to invade the country and it is wrong to stay; I wholeheartedly accept that, but Vladimir Putin was goaded into launching the invasion of him. The US hit the Russian bear with a sharp stick in the belief that it would retaliate aggressively.
While NATO held war games on Russia’s borders around this time last year, remember, the Russian leader urged Biden to sit up and speak. When the two finally spoke, it was in a 50-minute phone call on December 30, 2021, their second conversation that month at Putin’s request. Biden said he needed to see Russia reduce its military buildup to Ukraine’s borders; Putin responded by saying sanctions threatened by Washington and its allies could lead to a severing of ties.
One wonders if Zelensky has inadvertently become a useful idiot for the United States. Dressed in his signature military-style trousers and shirt, he thanked the United States for its support, warning that an easy end to the conflict is hard to see. “There can be no just peace in a war that has been forced upon us,” he insists.
His fiery speech was very different from the words of the same Ukrainian leader who urged the US president to moderate his rhetoric against Russia twelve months ago. However, like many leaders who depend on US support, his own rhetoric became more aggressive as Biden upped the ante in the war of words with Putin.
Perhaps intoxicated by American power, the Ukrainian leader traveled to Washington to address the US Congress last week, and Republican leaders in the new House are less enthusiastic about writing blank checks for military aid to Kiev. Public support is therefore essential.
I’m not sure whether Zelensky is naïve or blinded by the extent of US military might, but is Biden’s support really unconditional? As I wrote after a recent visit to Afghanistan, US bombs and missiles are no longer falling on innocent Afghans, but Biden’s executive order imposing sanctions and freezing Afghan assets has condemned large numbers of innocents to slow death for hunger. If this isn’t a war crime or a crime against humanity, I don’t know what is.
The US has treated Afghanistan like a high maintenance military playground and ordinary people have suffered the consequences. Biden even insulted Afghans for being ungrateful and not fighting the Taliban. I wonder how long it will take them to turn against the heroic Ukrainians, who have more than proved their worth in the face of Russian aggression.
READ: The Deplorable Situation of the Muslim Nation
I think the Ukrainian war was forced upon innocent Ukrainians, but not necessarily by Moscow. Russia was wrong to invade the country and it is wrong to stay; I wholeheartedly accept that, but Vladimir Putin was goaded into launching the invasion of him. The US hit the Russian bear with a sharp stick in the belief that it would retaliate aggressively.
While NATO held war games on Russia’s borders around this time last year, remember, the Russian leader urged Biden to sit up and speak. When the two finally spoke, it was in a 50-minute phone call on December 30, 2021, their second conversation that month at Putin’s request. Biden said he needed to see Russia reduce its military buildup to Ukraine’s borders; Putin responded by saying sanctions threatened by Washington and its allies could lead to a severing of ties.
One wonders if Zelensky has inadvertently become a useful idiot for the United States. Dressed in his signature military-style trousers and shirt, he thanked the United States for its support, warning that an easy end to the conflict is hard to see. “There can be no just peace in a war that has been forced upon us,” he insists.
His fiery speech was very different from the words of the same Ukrainian leader who urged the US president to moderate his rhetoric against Russia twelve months ago. However, like many leaders who depend on US support, his own rhetoric became more aggressive as Biden upped the ante in the war of words with Putin.
Perhaps intoxicated by American power, the Ukrainian leader traveled to Washington to address the US Congress last week, and Republican leaders in the new House are less enthusiastic about writing blank checks for military aid to Kiev. Public support is therefore essential.
I’m not sure whether Zelensky is naïve or blinded by the extent of US military might, but is Biden’s support really unconditional? As I wrote after a recent visit to Afghanistan, US bombs and missiles are no longer falling on innocent Afghans, but Biden’s executive order imposing sanctions and freezing Afghan assets has condemned large numbers of innocents to slow death for hunger. If this isn’t a war crime or a crime against humanity, I don’t know what is.
The US has treated Afghanistan like a high maintenance military playground and ordinary people have suffered the consequences. Biden even insulted Afghans for being ungrateful and not fighting the Taliban. I wonder how long it will take them to turn against the heroic Ukrainians, who have more than proved their worth in the face of Russian aggression.
Partition, regime change and geopolitical rivalries: what awaits the Middle East in 2023?
Perhaps no one has been more betrayed by the United States than the Palestinians. President Bill Clinton has placed himself at the heart of the Oslo Accords, the much-heralded “peace accord” between Israel and Palestinian leaders signed nearly 30 years ago. The agreement has been exposed as a sham and the Zionist state’s occupation of Palestine continues to grow and appears permanent, although few in Washington and other Western capitals admit it, especially the presidents of the United States. The fact is that the two-state solution is long dead. Instead, we see growing support for the one-state solution – a secular state with equal and democratic rights for all – because Palestinians recognize that it is the only way hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees can fulfill their legitimate right of return. . .
Clinton encouraged Palestinians to dream of peace, but despite the treaties, promises and pledges of successive Washington presidents, those dreams have been shattered. He betrayed the Palestinians in a big way. When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, 110,000 illegal settlers were living in the occupied Palestinian territories; today they are 600,000. Clinton’s promises were a classic betrayal of Washington. So much so that few Palestinians will still trust an American president.
Some political observers cite the Vietnam War as the nadir in US history, when secret talks began with North Vietnamese representatives in Paris. The United States supported the South Vietnamese by sending them money, supplies, and military advisers, but tens of thousands of body bags from U.S. soldiers fueled domestic opposition to the war.
To get Saigon to accept the secretly negotiated deal between Washington and Hanoi, the United States promised to provide significant military aid to South Vietnam. That aid never materialized.
In January 1973, a peace treaty was signed between the United States and the warring parties in Vietnam, resulting in a complete and shameful withdrawal of American forces. A similar situation occurred in Afghanistan in 2021. “It’s so easy to be an enemy of the United States,” former South Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Thieu said wryly, “but it’s so hard to be a friend.”
The irony is that the official motto of the United States is “In God We Trust”. And fortunately, because trust in US leaders is in tatters, both inside and outside the country. Zelensky should take Biden’s words with more than a pinch of salt. No American president can be trusted; his promises last only as long as they are suitable for Washington.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of East Monitor.
